Merkel, Schulz rally voters as Germany goes

Chancellor Angela Merkel and her rival Martin Schulz rallied voters on the eve of Sunday's vote, urging Germans to shun the first hard-right party expected to enter parliament in force since the end of World War II.

Merkel, the clear frontrunner after 12 years in power with a double-digit lead, also told her conservative base not to get complacent and to cast their ballots, rousing them with a folksy call to "bring home the bacon".

Her Social Democratic (SPD) rival, Martin Schulz, in a passionate Berlin speech on Friday told voters to reject the "sleeping-pill politics" of the famously cautious chancellor nicknamed "Mutti" (mummy) and vote against "another four years of stagnation and lethargy".

Both agree that voters must resist the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has railed against the influx of around one million mostly Muslim migrants and refugees, half of them from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The party with links to the far-right French National Front and Britain's UKIP has been polling at 11-13 per cent and is expected to enter the opposition benches of the Bundestag, heightening its visibility and state financing.

The International Auschwitz Committee warned that the "conglomerate of anti-Semites, enemies of democracy and nationalistic agitators" will bring "an inhuman coldness" to the glass-domed chamber of the Reichstag building.

Merkel - who has been heckled and booed as a "traitor" by AfD followers - was nonetheless headed back into one of their strongholds Saturday, in her Baltic coast constituency where the anti-Islam party beat Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) in state elections last year.

At Merkel's final major stump speech on Friday evening in the southern city of Munich, activists tried to drown her out with whistles and vuvuzelas and chants of "get lost".

But the 63-year-old refused to be derailed from her stability-and-prosperity stump speech, telling the crowd that "the future of Germany will definitely not be built with whistles and hollers".

Schulz, for his part, recalled with pride the SPD's history of resisting the Nazi regime and told the Berlin rally that "this Alternative for Germany is no alternative. They are a shame for our nation."

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, also a Social Democrat, warned that "for the first time since the end of the Second World War, real Nazis will sit in the German parliament".
One of two AfD leading candidates, Alexander Gauland, has called for Germans to shed their guilt over two world wars and the Holocaust and to take pride in their veterans.
He has also suggested that Germany's integration commissioner Aydan Ozoguz, who has Turkish roots, should be "disposed of in Anatolia".

Aside from the hard-right populist noise, the past two months of campaigning by the major parties have been widely criticised as lacklustre and uninspired, with few hot-button issues dividing the main contenders.

Source: Khaleej Times